Thursday, 30 May 2013

"With inputs from agencies" - More Copy/Paste Gulf News Shenanigans

Gulf News' inside front cover story today (flagged on the front cover) will be familiar to anyone who's been online over the past few days - the gang who ripped off tens of millions of dollars from RAKBank and Bank Muscat and the two alleged gang members who photographed themselves with a pile of cash in their car.

It carries a local byline but signs off with a little tag in italics - with inputs from agencies. So what precisely does that mean? Well, as we've seen before with similar GN stories, it means whole wodges of the report are actually not written by Gulf News at all, but simply copied and pasted from the newswires. I have alluded to this practice before. In the case of this story, "Stolen Gulf cash tipped off the FBI", Gulf News has used the text of a Bloomberg report verbatim - in fact, the story from the words "the digital currency company" to the end is Bloomberg's report. It represents a little under half the entire extent of the story.

Much of the rest of it is mostly rewritten or just plain copied from an Associated Press file:

On two pre-arranged days — once in December and again in February — criminals loaded with the lucrative debit cards and PIN numbers, headed into city streets around the world, racing from one ATM to the next, often taking out the maximum the cash machine would allow in a single transaction: $800.
In December, they worked for about 2 1/2 hours, reaping $5 million worldwide in about 4,500 transactions. Two months later, apparently buoyed by their success, they hit the ATMs for 10 hours straight, collecting $40 million in 36,000 transactions.Associated Press (running as "Bloodless bank heist impressed cybercrime experts" in The Guardian)

On a pre-arranged day in December, criminals loaded with the debit cards and PIN numbers, headed into city streets around the world, racing from one ATM to the next, often taking out the maximum the cash machine would allow in a single transaction: $800. They worked for about 2.5 hours, reaping $5 million worldwide in about 4,500 transactions.
In February, the gang hit the ATMs for 10 hours straight, collecting $40 million in 36,000 transactions.Gulf News, "Stolen Gulf cash tipped off the FBI"

So there we go. A story that happened right under Gulf News' nose, covered by cutting and pasting agency reports and the practice justified by 'with inputs from agencies', when in fairness what it really should say is 'with no real input from Gulf News'.

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I write books, I consult on publishing, media and digital communications, I cook. I spend quite a lot of my time laughing and do try not to be a stick-waving, spittle-flecked angry old man. I fail in this occasionally.